In January 2015, Kenyan police tear-gassed school children attending Langata Road Primary in Nairobi. Their offence? Attempting to pull down a stone wall erected during the holiday break around their school's playground. While eye-catching and headline-making around the world, this incident graphically illustrates that flagrant land grabbing continues unabated in contemporary Kenya. Observers of Kenya's land politics might be understandably perplexed: Didn't the 2010 Constitution promise an end to endemic corruption around land? Surely, the National Land Commission (NLC) can provide readdress for such acts and deliver land justice to the dispossessed?

In her new book, The Struggle for Land and Justice in Kenya, the legal scholar Ambreena Manji authoritatively provides answers to such inquiries – showing how the promise of the 2007 draft National Land Policy (NLP), the 2010 Constitution, and the subsequent suite of land laws drafted to implement the Constitution fall far short of what is needed for true land reform and land justice. Building on her own previous work, as well as the work of notable scholars such as Ghai, McAuslan and Harbeson, Manji provides a detailed overview of the history of the land struggle beginning in the colonial era, through the various commissions of inquiry, the formulation of the NLP, and the incorporation of land issues into the Constitution and drafting of the 2012 land laws. As she has argued elsewhere, the extensive land reform envisioned by the NLP became reduced to a mere rethinking of land in the context of administrative law – a process characterized by incoherent legal drafting, borrowing of laws from elsewhere in Africa, lack of attention to the objectives of the NLP, and tensions between the NLP and the Constitution, to name a few shortcomings. While there are many reasons for the deeply flawed laws that emerged, Manji attributes some of the blame to civil society, which while instrumental in pushing the NLP to fruition, failed ‘to challenge the technical legal approach, which marked the 2012 period’ (110).

Civil society actors, however, were not alone in undermining progress toward land reform –constitutional interpretation by the newly minted Supreme Court of Kenya was decisive. In an excellent and detailed analysis of the court and its advisory opinion on the roles and responsibilities of the NLC and its relationship to the Ministry of Lands, Manji shows how the court's deference to politics resulted in a disappointing decision that undercut the power of the NLC to act (e.g. issue land titles) and left it with the mere power to think (e.g. investigate historical land grievances). The decision left Kenya with a ‘resultant Land Commission that is a far cry from that envisaged by the Constitution and the National Land Policy’ (135). It did not have to be this way – and this judgement undergirds her subsequent argument for the need for historically informed jurisprudence.

In the last two chapters, Manji pivots toward a question that many of us who care about Kenya and its democratic future hold dear: what can be done? In ‘Rethinking Historical Land Injustices’ (150), Manji argues that the temporal categorisation of land injustices into ‘historical’ versus ‘present’ in policy and law is a false dichotomy. Rather, they are ‘intricately connected, the land injustices of the past enable and deepen those of the present, structuring the economy, determining who owns what, and deeply affecting class formation’. To address its long-standing, simmering, and periodically deadly land grievances, Kenya needs land restitution – but it has no current clear path (or apparent appetite) for doing so. Manji sees a few glimmers of light. These include Alden-Wiley's hopeful perspective that the Community Land Act of 2016 might serve as a vehicle for the restitution of lost communal lands, as well as the legal activism of indigenous groups such as the Ogiek, whose call for recognition is inextricably linked to the land to which they belong. Manji is very concerned about the role of law itself – it has served as a handmaiden to oppression, while being unrealistically cast as the primary tool for addressing land wrongs. She argues for a richer form of legal analysis around land – a multidisciplinary critical scholarship embedded in social history, politics and the history of ideas. Her book certainly provides a persuasive illustration of the power of such research for deepening scholarly understanding. I hope its reach and resonance, however, is much farther, namely to the Kenyan policymakers, politicians and civil society actors upon whom land justice in Kenya relies.